11-05

3D Scanning in Egypt and Image-based Object Editing

I will present an overview of a project to capture and use digital models of museum artifacts for the purposes of education and public information. I will begin by describing the original design of a 3D scanning system now in use in Cairoâs Egyptian Museum. The system captures both the geometry and surface color and detail of museum artifacts. I will report on the experience using the system and present samples of how the processed 3D data will be used on a web site designed to communicate Egyptian culture. One of the greatest problems that we have faced in the project is the need to have edits on complex 3D objects specified by non-technical end-users such as historians. I will present a new approach we are exploring in which we convert the problem of editing a 3D object of arbitrary size and surface properties to a problem of editing a 2D image. We allow the user to specify small edits in both geometry and surface properties from any view and at any resolution they find convenient, regardless of the interactive rendering capability of their computer. We believe a purely image-based approach to 3D editing offers the potential to make graphics tools available to a wider population of end-users.